What does it mean to be a “social aesthetic environment artist”?

Year 2005
Text by Pino Poggi

A social aesthetic environment artist is basically not a conventional artist anymore; he must be diverse, meddle in the present and the past, live and explore his own identity, constantly inform himself politically and socially, read and communicate. He must become a writer and scriptwriter, be ready to build his own productions, think and act as a director, document and perceive everything like a cameraman. He must be a bricklayer, an architect and a carpenter at the same time, maybe even become a musician, a light specialist and much more…

Like a conventional artist he must of course design concept sketches for his projects, think through a number of possibilities that best suit his visual statement which he wants to convey. He must be able to calculate both the exact cost of his space and, like a philosopher, to contemplate his social statement, consider to what extent his dialectics and rhetoric serve the purpose of his enterprise, how far he can and may go. Like a sociologist and a social worker, he even needs to know how his audience will react to what he’s portrayed, in short, it sometimes takes months, sometimes years, to complete his work!